Morrissey: Heaven knows why he's miserable

With a residency at the Roundhouse next week and a new album due later this year, Morrissey is more popular than ever. By Michael Deacon

'Oh, you silly old man. You silly old man in your misguided trousers. The song you just sang, it sounds exactly like the last one. I know that you say how age has no meaning, but here is your audience now and they're screaming: 'Get off the stage!'?"

Morrissey wrote those lyrics in 1990 for the B-side Get Off the Stage. It was rumoured to be a jeer at Mick Jagger for being a rock relic who had the temerity to tour at the age of 47. Those lines were amusing then, but, in a way, they're more amusing now. On Monday, our fearless young Mancunian iconoclast begins a six-date residency at the Roundhouse in London. He's 48.

But nobody - save perhaps a certain music magazine we'll come to later - will be screaming for Morrissey to get off the stage. The "Prince of Wails" is arguably more successful than ever.

His most recent album, Ringleader of the Tormentors (2006), went to No 1. In the past four years, two of his singles have reached No 3; the highest his former band the Smiths ever got was No 10. Last summer, he played a jubilantly popular US tour. On Feb 11, he releases his greatest hits; a new album is due in the autumn.

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And to think that, between 1998 and 2003, he didn't even have a record deal. So how has this startling upswing in commercial fortunes come about? Has the world changed, or has he changed?

Judging by his latest lyrics, he hasn't. "Nobody wants my love," he howls on the as-yet-unreleased I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris. "Disappointment came to me and booted me and bruised and hurt me," he bawls on his forthcoming single That's How People Grow Up.

Twenty-five years since he first appeared on record, on the Smiths' anguished Hand in Glove, Morrissey is still insisting to his adoring millions that nobody likes him.

The world, by contrast, has changed. During Morrissey's wilderness years, the charts were dominated by dance and R&B. Not exactly a favourable climate for the man who, on the Smiths' 1986 hit Panic, had hollered: "Burn down the disco, hang the blessed DJ."

But then British indie surged back. Its leading bands, the Libertines and Franz Ferdinand, could scarcely get through an interview without saying how much Morrissey's work had influenced them. In 2004, his first album for seven years, You Are the Quarry, was drenched with praise. It was all right to like Morrissey again. Even NME, who gave him good reviews for the first time in a decade, liked him.

Until November last year, anyway. In a now infamous issue of the magazine, Morrissey was quoted as asserting that "the higher the influx [of immigrants] into England, the more the British identity disappears".

NME declared his views "inflammatory"; his language, it said, "dangerously echoes" that of the BNP. Morrissey immediately issued writs against the magazine and its editor for defamation. He also issued a statement saying that his quotes had been "butchered, re-designed, re-ordered, chopped, snipped and split", adding that "racism is beyond reason and has no place in our society". The case has yet to come to court.

We could argue all day about the issues - although, for legal reasons, we'd probably better not. But there's a more interesting debate: why the political and sociological opinions of pop stars matter so much to us. It is, it seems, no longer enough for a singer to write good songs; they must also hold the correct opinions. They must be not only gifted enough to be our hero, but nice enough to be our friend.

NME stammered that it was "shocked" to find Morrissey speaking about immigration in the style of a "Tory MP". Surely the opinions in themselves cannot have shocked the magazine; such views are, after all, hardly unique. What apparently shocked it was that the man expressing those opinions was one of its favourite singers. It is, apparently, inconceivable to NME that an artistically talented person might have such views.

Artistic talent, the magazine seems to believe, is the exclusive preserve of the right-on. Fingers crossed that nobody lends its editor any biographies of, say, Larkin, Dalí, Eliot, Woolf or Pound, all of whom held opinions far more illusion-shattering to the liberal than Morrissey's.

The new song All You Need Is Me, which appears on Morrissey's greatest-hits collection, features the presumably press-targeted refrain, "There's so much destruction all over the world - and all you can do is complain about me." Morrissey wrote it before the race uproar, but it sounds all the more pertinent today.

Still, perhaps his fans should thank NME. Chart-topping albums, peer acclaim and sold-out live residencies are useless to him as a lyricist. Morrissey lives off frustration, gloom, anger and paranoia. These fresh new stocks should come in handy.